12 May 08 - 11:31Aklo on the Beach
(published ‘Ocean Gypsy’ 1993)
The Ocean was a whitewash upon a billowing blue skin.
Aklo stood at its edge, delving the stunted sea-snakes of his bare toes in the umber loam. Grit became uncomfortably engrained under their helmets, causing them to wriggle almost without his volition, yet feeling delicious in the warm mulch of the beach.
“You know she never existed.”
The one who had spoken to Aklo was nameless. Counsellors required no definition: personalities were mere impediments to gaining empathy with their subjects. And, after all these years, the Counsellor knew Aklo better even than she knew herself. Aklo was a handsome man, whilst the counsellor was sexless, deemed a ‘she’ for convenience of reference. In a different world of circumstances, she would have been a beautiful woman.
Now, far from the city, where Aklo worked as a clerk in a tanning factory, they had turned for a re-enactment of Aklo’s holiday romance: one that ...
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12 May 08 - 11:28The Extra
(Published 'Black Mole' 1991)
He went to the town because he’d heard they were shooting a horror film there and they would no doubt require several extras for the crowd scenes. He thought his bent nose would stand him in good stead.
The town lacked description. Although he knew that from all the guides, he was not ready for the churchless affair that presented itself. As he drove out of the November fogs into a crystal clear afternoon, what he noticed were the lines of identical red brick maisonettes forming a geometrical grid that even a mathematician would find boring. A social anthropologist might make an interesting study of what made the people tick who chose to live there but beyond that he with the bent nose could not hope to fathom.
The film crews were nowhere to be seen. No arc lights had been erected, no touchy lead actress putting on airs and graces, no fat man with cigar sitting in a deckchair and, above all, no crowds milling about ready to fire ...
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11 May 08 - 07:42*Hey Garland, I dig your Tweed coat*
A collaboration with John Travis
'Hey Garland, I dig your harris tweed coat,' said the man in the bar, coughing and spluttering under the fan which decapitated large insects.
'Last time. My name is NOT Garland and this is NOT a tweed coat.' Half a daddy-longlegs fell in his beer. 'My name is Alan.'
Alan looked around for hope of rescue. In one corner someone had bent a promotional cardboard man in two, his unpainted brown back facing him in a bow. The jukebox rumbled like a broken combine harvester, the lights skidded off the lenses of his greasy spectacles and swallowed a cockroach chewing a beermat. He'd had enough he decided.
Out on the street cars moved too quickly for his liking. He looked at a black sleeve. How could anyone think it was TWEED?
'Excuse me,' said a voice as thick as the pub it had just come from. 'Mr.Garland? ...
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07 May 08 - 15:36Too Much Love
published 'Terrible Work' 1994
The white holes, black holes, solid masses, black masses that allot the universes to their various realities – between such vastnesses and the single mother in a single house upon a solitary Earth with an only child, there are smaller spaces that can be envisaged through a pin-hole.
She scatters tin-tacks and drawing-pins upon her lap, a peppering, a pricking-out, points pointed to all points of the compass – and she lovingly lingers awaiting her only child’s loving lunge amid her loving limbs...
Who hurt whom? Such a question is as pointless as asking why, eventually, even holes grow grey.
07 May 08 - 15:35Half The Battle
Published 'Purple Patch' 1994
Townsea was a wind-swept place, too near the coast to be deemed inland, and vice versa. Many people had lived there over the centuries. Now, there only remained the oldest who had once been the youngest. And there were strangers, too, who turned up at night to frequent Townsea's only public house.
Unlike the Townsea settlers, the strangers had names - and Thorpe Allen was one such. The locals had the sea in their ears, since they couldn't admit to deafness and Thorpe Allen must have thought he was talking to dummies, because they merely stared back even at his most controversial statements about the battle between life and death. The trees outside shook in one of the many tail-ends of an endemic gale - and the other strangers slapped the locals on the back, despite knowing it was useless to be friendly in a place like Townsea. In fact, there were no trees to shake. ...
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04 May 08 - 09:00Carkesomee
(published 'The Third half' 1988 )
There is good and evil, the one offsetting the other. Without one, there would be no possibility of the other.
That was until Carkesomee arrived on the scene; neither good nor evil. Or was it that he was too good or too evil - and was this a he, she or it? Did he begin or end....or ever be....or never be...?
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Captain Abraham Bintiff had fought what he had considered to be his own war. He had conducted his men like musical notes in a cacophony. As they went over the top, he fled the other way, running, running, running...
...The notes became minimal, repetitive, cyclic, scales sliding under scales, perpetuating. He arrived panting in an area surrounded by the fog gods of his nightmares. He recognised them by their winding, weary shapes and by their desperate groaning, groaning attempts to break free from the earth's pull.
Abraham was a round-faced fellow with a military moustache ...
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